THE MEDLEVAL BACKGROUND 9
Fathers, the canon law and its interpreters; the
typical controversy is carried on in terms of morality
and religion as regularly and inevitably as two centuries
later it is conducted in terms of economic expediency.
It is not necessary to point out that the age of
Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell had nothing to
learn from the twentieth century as to the niceties of
political intrigue or commercial sharp practice. But
a cynical unscrupulousness in high places is not incom-
patible with a general belief in the validity of moral
standards which are contradicted by it. No one can
read the discussions which took place between 1500
and 1550 on three ..burning igsues—the rise in prices,
capital and interest, and the lan^questi^ninJEngland—
without being struck by the constant appeal ifCTn the
new and clamorous economic interests of the day to
the traditional Christian morality, which in social
organization, as in tJtie~relations of individuals, is still
conceived to be the final authority. It is because it
is regarded as the final authority that the officers of
the Church claim to be heard on questions of social
policy, and that, however Catholics, Anglicans,
Lutherans, and Calvinists may differ on doctrine or
ecclesiastical government, Luther and Calvin, Latimer
and Laud, John Knox and the Pilgrim Fathers are
agreed that social morality is the province of the
Church, and are prepared both to teach it, and to
enforce it, when necessary, by suitable discipline.
By the middle of the seventeenth century all that
is altered. After the Restoration, we are in a new
world of economic, as well as of political, thought.
The claim of religion, at best a shadowy claim, to
maintain rules of good conscience in economic affairs
finally vanished with the destruction of Laud's experi-
ment in a confessional State, and with the failure of
the work of the Westminster Assembly. After the^
Civil War, the attempt to maintain the theory that
there was a Christian standard of economic conduct